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One year away from the presidential elections, the authoritarian coalition in Congress -which will govern Peru since the end of 2022- is preparing its last offensive to eliminate the remaining opposition and capture the entities that remain out of its control with the final goal of reaching the April 12, 2026 elections unhindered. With its strategy to remove political figures from competition, its appointments in the Ombudsman's Office, the Constitutional Court and Comptroller's Office, the dismantling of the Sunedu, the symbolic silencing of the Place of Memory, and its influence in the National Board of Justice, the final list of stumbling blocks has been reduced to the judicial systemand electoral, as well as civil society organizations and the media.

On March 12, the latest attack by Congress -with the consent of Dina BoluarteAffairs- 's Ministry of Foreign fell on civil society organizations, indigenous peoples' collectives and independent media such as OjoPúblico, which is a non-profit organization, through a law that turns the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation (APCI, in Spanish) into a political weapon of the Executive. The purpose of the law is to apply mandatory registration (a regulation already declared unconstitutional in 2007) and prior censorship (contrary to the Magna Carta and the Inter-American Human Rights System), under the threat of imposing sanctions of up to 2.6 million soles (USD 700.000) or leaving them on the verge of closure, either for litigating against the State or, in the case of the media, publishing their articles without the Government's permission.

Boluarte –highlighted by the corruption and the 49 deaths in the Andean south in the protests cases in favor of the advance of the 2022 and 2023 elections– promulgated said law (No. 32031) at the Government Palace in an event broadcast live by the State channel. After starting his speech, indicating that the norm sought "transparency and to strengthen our democracy", he ended by saying: "[We are] going to put under exhaustive review a minority of NGOs that act against the interests of our country, sowing hatred [and seeking] to destabilize and promote division [...] to advance their own ideological agenda [...] using libertarianism to introduce international agendas that seek to break our unity". Boluarte, who has a 4% approval rating in Peru, and whose disapproval rating is the lowest in South America, called the parties that promoted the law "courageous".

In this way, the Executive and Congress are taking advantage of the global context, favorable to authoritarians, to violate the rights of association, access to justice and freedom of the press. Donald Trump'sin the United States  rise to power not only represented a telluric movement for the international democratic and economic system, but also a favorable boost for anti-rights groups. In the circumstances of these days, the international community in Peru - which in November 2024 spoke out firmly against such a norm - today remains largely silent and expectant, apparently more concerned about the course of global trends and oriented to its national concerns on trade, political and national security issues, due to Washington's actions.

The enactment of this law -which seeks to stifle civil society organizations and the media- is not original. In the recent past, authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as those in Venezuela and Nicaragua, have issued similar directives. The formula, which has been applied in Eastern European and Asian countries in the zone of influence of Putin's Russia (Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan), is also invoked by China, Turkey and India to silence critics. Currently, a similar offensive is notorious in the United States under the Trump Administration. Irrespective of ideological positions and rivalries, the slogan of the State, in these times, seems to be the same: to concentrate total power, dissent must be stamped out.

In Peru, which is experiencing the same international authoritarian pattern, the decline of the rule of law and the separation of powers is more than notorious in the last five years. Since 2022, reports from organizations that study the health of democracies have warned about the threat looming in the country. For example, the V-Dem Institute (Varities of Democracy) concluded in its March report that Peru has worsened in its indicators and is consolidating since 2023 as a "democracy with episodes of autocratization", a category in which it remains for the second consecutive year. This position, after a fall of 11 places, places us close to the transit zone that leads to the block of electoral autocracies.

"[We are] going to put under exhaustive review a minority of NGOs that act against the interests of our country, sowing hatred [and seeking] to destabilize and promote division [...] to advance their own ideological agenda", said Boluarte

Other reports, coming from dissimilar organizations in their analysis, are equally worrisome. The Intelligence Unit of The Economist magazine has considered that Peru remains in the category of "hybrid regime" for the third consecutive year. Until 2021, the country was placed in the group of the so-called "deficient democracies", but it was downgraded due to the circumstances that occurred in December 2022: from the failed coup attempt of Pedro Castillo, to the repression of the Boluarte government. For Freedom House, Peru lives, as of 2022, under a "partially free" democratic system. Other indicators from Human Rights Watch and Transparency International register the same drop in human rights and anti-corruption indexes.

APCI Law: a law that violates freedom of the press and professional secrecy

In this propitious environment, the Congress managed to float an illegal norm that it had been working on since 2023, after seeing its continuity in power threatened by the protests in favor of the elections. With the law to "strengthen" the APCI - an entity created in 2002 to conduct Peru's social development policy - it intends to muzzle civil society organizations and, additionally, to install a regime of prior censorship for the independent media. In this area -the right to freedom of press and information-, the law is the most harmful in the country since the end of the 20th century, when Fujimori intervened the media in the 1992 self-coup, and bought the editorial lines of newspapers and channels with state money in order to remain in office until 2005.

The approval of this law is an alarming milestone for freedom of information, in one of the historical periods of greatest siege to the media in the last 25 years. The origin of this latest wave of state animosity against the press - which is also a trademark of societies in times of the rise of authoritarian leaderships - can be traced back to Pedro Castillo's arrival to power in 2021, and in the 17 months he was in office until his failed coup d'état. However, this strategy of hostility towards the independent media has been consolidated throughout the 27 months that Boluarte has been in power, with the support of the coalition that governs from the Parliament.

Since Boluarte assumed the presidency, an episode that was followed by a state repression that left 49 people murdered in the midst of marches for new elections, Congress has drafted at least 10 bills to restrict freedom of the press, regardless of their financial sustainability model. The bills, mainly presented during the presidency of Alejandro Soto (from Alianza para el Progreso, César Acuña's party), sought to criminalize the work of individual journalists, but also to strangle the economic capacity of the media, which are also part of a global industry at risk due to the challenges of technology, changing audience habits and disinformation.

In the case of the attack on journalists, congressional bills have called for an increase in prison sentences for crimes against honor (so that reporters can serve effective imprisonment), to the possible penalization of their access to confidential information, a sort of revenge for publicly exposing the version of effective collaborators in corruption cases. The Legislature has also sought to tighten the law of rectification, so that they are obliged to retract the day after its publication (and not seven days later), or to demand a professional university degree or affiliation to the Journalists' Association, as a prerequisite to practice the profession.

SOCIETY. Keiko Fujimori's party is one of the main supporters of President Dina Boluarte.

Photo: Presidency of Peru

Since Boluarte has been in power - in addition to his threats against the press for allegedly promoting "coups d'état" or "false news" - the Parliament has presented bills to stifle the financing of the media through prohibitions to contract with the State, or to incorporate them in "transparency" registries so that they render to the State "annual reports" (under penalty of fine or cancellation of the media), regardless of whether the funds of the newsrooms come from commercial advertising, sale of printed matter, advertising in social networks such as YouTube or donations. These attacks were noted by the mission of the Inter American Press Association that arrived in Peru in March, as well as by the National Association of Journalists and the Peruvian Press Council.

The most recent example of the combined attack from the Executive and the Legislative against civil society organizations and the media has occurred in the last few days. On March 30, Justice Minister Eduardo Arana said he would present a bill to oblige television channels to broadcast government actions against crime in states of emergency. Then on April 2, Boluarte said, in the morning, that the "NGOs live by demanding impunity for criminals"; while in the afternoon of the same day, the head of Congress, Eduardo Salhuana (from Acuña's party), signed the law to "strengthen" the APCI before sending it to the office of Boluarte, who today placed his final seal on it.

Mandatory registration and prior censorship of APCI are unconstitutional

With the enactment, the Executive and the Congress have implemented a rule that clearly violates the Peruvian Constitution and the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System, regarding freedom of the press and information and confidentiality of sources, in the case of independent media. According to the new regulation, this type of news organizations will have to register in the registry of said entity and, then, submit their "projects and activities" -for a media outlet this is the editorial line, coverage decisions, information gathering process and journalistic publications- to the prior permission of the APCI. This means that authorization will have to be sought from the State to write and publish.

The Constitution - even the one promulgated by Fujimori after the 1992 self-coup - rejects prior censorship: "Everyone has the right to freedom of information, opinion, expression and dissemination of thought through the oral or written word or image, by any means of social communication, without prior authorization or any censorship or impediment, under the responsibilities of the law". Similarly, the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights, already applied in reports and judgments in Latin America, states: [the right to freedom of expression] may not be subject to prior censorship" and "the right of expression may not be restricted by indirect ways or means, such as the abuse of official controls".

The new regulation also presents other threats. For example, the position of executive director of the APCI, according to the new regulation, will be decided by only one person: the President of the Republic, at the suggestion of Foreign Affairs (until now the election was made by a Board of Directors composed of representatives of other entities). Currently, the person who occupies the highest position in the APCI is the one who makes the final decision on sanctions and infractions. Once the law was approved, the same official, but appointed by the Executive, would be responsible for authorizing or not our journalistic work. Additionally, the Congress decided to eliminate the APCI's Consultative Committee, which means that all power is concentrated in the Presidential Office.

In Peru, an organization such as OjoPúblico is accountable through external and independent audits and also to the State. For example, it reports to the tax agency Sunat(, attached to the Ministry of Economy and Finance the declaration of its financial income), to Sunafil of the Ministry of Labor (in the case of its monthly payrolls and labor policies), to the Personal Data Authority of the Ministry of Justice (the personal data it collects and treats as a digital media), and to the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Superintendence of Banking and Insurance (as a subject obliged in the framework of the money laundering system). Now, with this law, the State seeks that we account for our activities and contents to the APCI, attached to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Almost 20 years ago, then President Alan Garcia and the APRA-led Congress, barely five months in power, managed to pass a similar law (No. 28925), which forced civil society organizations to register with the APCI. At that time, Peru's most conservative political sectors blamed these types of institutions for having pushed for trials and convictions against members of the Armed Forces for human rights violations during the internal armed conflict and for corruption and illicit enrichment during the Fujimori regime, as well as for being behind the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the acts of violence that occurred between 1980 and 2000.

COALITION. The president of Congress together with three of the co-authors of the questioned law. These are part of the parties led by Keiko Fujimori, César Acuña and Vladimir Cerrón (extreme leftist and currently a fugitive from justice).

Photo: Congress of the Republic.

In December 2006, in a similar initiative, the Congressional Foreign Relations Commission, chaired by Alberto Fujimori's former lawyer, legislator Rolando Sousa Huananbal (of the then pro-Fujimori party Alianza por el Futuro), sent the text of that law (No. 28925) to Parliament for a vote and then to Alan García's office for its publication. Last month, with almost two decades of difference, the Foreign Affairs Commission, presided by Aurelia Obando Morgan (of the pro-Fujimori party Fuerza Popular), did the same by processing the current law -much more harmful than the one enacted by the legislature of the APRA period- with the aim of sending it to the Executive of Boluarte.

However, the extreme of that 2006 norm, which sought the mandatory registration of civil society organizations, was declared contrary to the Magna Carta by the Constitutional Court in August 2007. Since then, the idea of reviving this illegal law appeared, from time to time, in the discourse of the politician in office when a lawsuit against the abuse of the State or a publication put his stability in power at risk, either during Ollanta Humala's five years in power, or in the brief governments that followed, after Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's resignation from the presidency in 2018.

Behind the law: the parties of Fujimori, Acuña, Cerrón and López Aliaga

The origin of the current law, which resurrects the spirit of the failed norm of Alan Garcia's government, came back to life in 2023, when a congressman of Peru Libre (of the fugitive Vladimir Cerron) presented a bill that sought "the obligatory nature [of registering in the APCI] and the presentation of annual declarations". In only six months, from October 2023, when the first proposal appeared, to April 2024, five other bills appeared in the Foreign Affairs Commission, presided by Alejandro Aguinaga (Fuerza Popular). The authors were legislators from Renovación Popular (led by Rafael López Aliaga), Alianza para el Progreso (César Acuña), Fuerza Popular (Keiko Fujimori), Unidad y Diálogo Parlamentario, and Perú Libre. Finally, all of them were accumulated in a single bill approved last March 12.

It is enough to read the regulation in detail to realize how damaging it can be. The Act of Parliament states in Article 4 that the organizations, after mandatory registration with the APCI, must report on their "plans, programs and projects [...] and their objectives", either before the beginning of the year, when they have already been carried out or when it is a question of modifying them. Article 4 also states that the APCI shall: "Give prior conformity to the execution of the plans, programs, projects or activities registered by the agencies". In short, nothing may be done without the prior permission of the APCI, which will also decide on the deadlines for their approval.

As a media outlet, OjoPúblico's main activity is to generate journalistic content of public interest in different formats and digital platforms. With the regulation approved by Boluarte, the Government seeks to force this and other newsrooms, of similar nature, to ask for permission to publish their contents. That is to say, to request the approval of the APCI, an entity that in the future will have as executive director someone chosen by the Presidency of the Republic. This violates the freedom and independence of the media, especially because the Head of State, as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, are high-ranking public officials who may be investigated for committing irregularities in the exercise of their functions.

PARTNER. Education business magnate, César Acuña, is another of President Dina Boluarte's pillars.

Photo: Presidency of Peru

Under the new law, independent media are under threat of being sanctioned if they do not agree to register or do not report their annual plan of activities. In addition, they may be punished for "serious infringement" if they do not wait for "the prior approval of the APCI" before starting to publish their journalistic content. Not only that, if they accept the registration, such entity could demand, what the law calls, "supporting documentation [...] of the plans or projects" of the organization. In other words, the law leaves open the possibility that the agency, within the framework of an oversight process, may coercively and subjectively demand whatever it deems necessary -even at the risk of violating the media's constitutional right to journalistic confidentiality- in order to verify whether everything has been carried out "in accordance" with the provisions of these public officials.

Among the "very serious" faults, the APCI considers, according to the approved law, that the media should use "resources" for "activities that have been declared administratively or judicially as acts that affect public order, citizen security, national defense, internal order or damage public or private property". That is to say, if the media is sued at judicial level for covering events of public interest such as, for example, covering protests against the Government, revealing illicit acts of the Executive, or publishing information evidencing bad acts of the Defense and Interior sector, of the intelligence agencies of the Police and the Armed Forces, or of entities such as the National Intelligence Directorate (DINI), the APCI may punish the media with a serious sanction.

Likewise, according to the new law, APCI "shall report to the corresponding entities any indication that any registered organization is carrying out actions that may contravene the Political Constitution and current legislation". This leaves open the possibility for an APCI official to report to the Public Prosecutor's Office or the Police any act that he/she considers irregular, in a subjective manner. With these elements, the Congress leaves to the mercy of said agency the sanction to impose: from the "written warning", a "fine of up to 500 UIT (2.6 million soles, USD 700 thousand dollars)", "the temporary suspension of the benefits granted by the inscription in the Registries" and the "cancellation of the inscription in the Registries".

The law -in the final provisions of the bill signed by the head of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Parliament, Aurelia Obando Morgan- also seeks that two other public entities accompany the APCI with its new regulation: the National Superintendence of Tax Administration (Sunat) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF). The UIF is asked to "implement information transfer and alert mechanisms" to adopt "preventive measures" against civil society entities and the media; while the Sunat is asked to evaluate the creation of a "unit" within its organization to enforce the unconstitutional regulation approved by Boluarte.

It is clear, a year before the presidential elections, that the Executive and its allied parties in Congress are orchestrating one of the final offensives to muzzle the civil society and the independent media in order to criminalize and silence them and thus have a clear path to consolidate their hold on power. The road is still long, after Boluarte approved the law, the Executive has 90 working days, as a maximum term, to present the regulations that will enforce the controversial norm, when it does so, Peru will already be completely submerged in an electoral year that will decide the fate of the country on April 12, 2026.